over half of the world’s population lives in cities and united nations (un) demographers project an increase of 2.5 billion more urban dwellers by 2050. yet there is too little systematic comparative research on the practice of urban health policy and management (hpam), particularly in the megacities of middle-income and developing nations. we make a case for creating a global database on citie...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) has received substantial attention as a potential approach for improving health outcomes while lowering costs of care, and for improving the relevance and quality of clinical and health services research. The Institute of Medicine defines CER as 'the conduct and synthesis of systematic research comparing different interventions and strategies to prevent,...

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has launched PCORnet, a major initiative to support an effective, sustainable national research infrastructure that will advance the use of electronic health data in comparative effectiveness research (CER) and other types of research. In December 2013, PCORI's board of governors funded 11 clinical data research networks (CDRNs) and 18 pa...

The panel addresses the urgent need to ensure that comparative effectiveness research (CER) findings derived from diverse and distributed data sources are based on credible, high-quality data; and that the methods used to assess and report data quality are consistent, comprehensive, and available to data consumers. The panel consists of representatives from four teams leveraging electronic clin...

BACKGROUND The Comprehensive Post-Acute Stroke Services (COMPASS) Study is one of the first large pragmatic randomized-controlled clinical trials using comparative effectiveness research methods, funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. In the COMPASS Study, we compare the effectiveness of a patient-centered, transitional care intervention versus usual care for stroke patient...

The Electronic Data Methods (EDM) Forum announces the launch of eGEMs (Generating Evidence and Methods to improve patient outcomes), a new, free, open access, peer-reviewed e-publication. eGEMs aims to disseminate innovative ideas about how electronic clinical data (ECD) can be leveraged in comparative effectiveness research (CER), patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) and quality improveme...

The advantages of modeling the unreliability of outcomes when evaluating the comparative effectiveness of health interventions is illustrated. Adding an action-research intervention component to a regular summer job program for youth was expected to help in preventing risk behaviors. A series of simple two-group alternative structural equation models are compared to test the effect of the inter...

BACKGROUND While randomized controlled trials represent the highest level of evidence we can generate in comparative effectiveness research, there are clinical scenarios where this type of study design is not feasible. The Comparative Effectiveness Analyses of Surgery and Radiation in localized prostate cancer (CEASAR) study is an observational study designed to compare the effectiveness and ha...

There is a growing interest in new or modified research methods that can balance the needs for quick results and statistical rigor in studies of intervention effectiveness. Orthogonal design, which has been extensively used in manufacturing and other fields but not in published health care evaluations or comparative effectiveness research (CER), affords an opportunity to design interventions in...

In the last decade, anthropology has faced challenges to its self-definition associated both with new worldly circumstances and scholarly trends inside and outside the discipline. Recent interest in globalization has provoked discussion concerning what anthropology should be about, how it might be done, and what its relationships are to other bodies of literature and knowledge practices. Unsett...